Moore's Ford probe: Items seized during Walton excavation

Posted: Wednesday, July 02, 2008

State and federal agents looking for evidence in the 1946 Moore's Ford lynching seized items Tuesday from a property in rural Walton County, authorities said.

Agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation began their search Monday, following up on "recent information" they received about the decades-old unsolved murders, the FBI said.

The search involved extensive digging in the backyard of the home, though authorities didn't say what type of items they took.

The current residents of the home aren't suspects, the FBI said.

Three weeks away from the anniversary of the July 25 lynching - in which an angry white mob killed two young black couples at the Moore's Ford bridge between Oconee and Walton counties - people pushing for prosecution in the case said they hope the new evidence leads somewhere.

"We just pray and hope that this is another step toward the arrest and prosecution of those suspects who are still living," said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials.

Five of the 55 suspects federal investigators identified in 1946 still are living in Walton County, some of them in the area of this week's search, said Brooks, an Atlanta Democrat.

Brooks told reporters last month that law enforcement officials are "moving in" on the five suspects, but later downplayed the comments, saying only that there is sufficient evidence to arrest them.

On Tuesday, Brooks was under the impression that agents took weapons from the Walton County home.

"I really believe these weapons are related to the lynch mob," he said, adding that someone likely buried the weapons used in the crime.

Authorities at the property detonated a bomb Monday - an "old military ordnance," according to the FBI - but said the bomb was not related to the killings.

Members of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee, a group of Walton and Oconee residents who formed a decade ago to investigate the case, were caught off-guard by the search, said Penny Young, a committee member and a descendant of one of the lynching victims, Roger Malcom.

"I'm sitting here on pins and needles hoping I can recognize something," Young said Tuesday while watching a television news broadcast from the Michael Road site.

In what has become one of the state's most infamous race-related crimes, Malcom, along with Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey, were abducted in Oconee County, then shot near the Moore's Ford Bridge, which links the two counties over the Apalachee River.

Calls for prosecution in the case only have increased in recent years.

FBI agents last year reopened their investigation, joining the GBI, which reopened its Moore's Ford inquiry several years ago on orders of then-Gov. Roy Barnes.

In April, on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Rep. John Lewis called for justice during a march at the bridge.

Brooks' group will hold its fourth annual re-enactment of the killings later this month at the bridge.